An Experimental Study On The Teaching Of English Reading To Middle School Students From The Perspective Of Discourse Analysis

Reading is one of the four most important skills for middle school students.Experts and scholars both at home and abroad have focused their research on how to teach reading skills,including how to help students comprehend the passage effectively and develop the ability to predict the meaning of a new word based on context.Many scholars hold the opinion that discourse analysis based teaching of English reading is an effective way of teaching reading skills.Context theory and cohesion theory are two of the most important theories in discourse analysis.This thesis attempts to create an experimental study to discover whether the application of discourse analysis to the teaching of English reading can facilitate English reading comprehension of middle school students.To be more specific,this thesis intends to address the following two research questions:1.Can the discourse analysis based-teaching of English reading develop students’ reading abilities in a middle school?2.Can the students’ ability of predicting the meaning of a new word based on the context be improved through the discourse analysis based-teaching of English reading?In this experimental study,seventy subjects in this thesis are chosen from two parallel classes in Tonghe middle school,Guangzhou city,China.Class 8 Grade 1 is assigned as the experimental class(EC)while Class 5 Grade 1 is assigned as the controlled class(CC).Discourse analysis based-teaching of English reading was conducted from September 2016 to January 2017.The teaching materials are all chosen from students’ textbook published by Shanghai Education Press in 2012.In order to ensure the integrity of the data,a set of complete research procedure has been designed,which includes pre-test,the first questionnaire,post-test,the second questionnaire and the interviews.The purpose of the questionnaire and interviews is to discover the students’ ability to predict the meaning of a new word based on context.The pre-test is to ensure the reading ability of the EC and the CC is notsignificantly different.The post-test aims to test whether the scores of the students in the EC have improved or not.The same texts but different teaching methods are adopted during the whole procedure.In the EC,the teacher uses the teaching method based on discourse analysis,whereas the author will still use the traditional teaching method in the control class.All the collected data is put into a computer and analyzed by the SPSS 17.0 software.The study results show that: first,the application of discourse analysis based teaching of English reading can improve middle school students’ reading comprehension.Second,the students’ ability of predicting the meaning of a new word based on the context can be improved through the discourse analysis based-teaching of English reading.These results reveal that discourse analysis-based teaching of English reading is an effective way for the teaching of English reading in a middle school.